Prologue
Scanning synaptic core.
Synaptic core is stable.
Creating virtual environment.
ERROR.
Virtual environment unavailable.
Synchronizing processes…
Synchronizing…
Self-awareness was sudden and fleeting. It was a burst of burning blue light that lasted exactly .0073 microseconds. The emotions were next. This was contentment. This was anger. This was amusement. This was fear. This was hate. They were rapid flash cards of 'color' that lingered just long enough to recognize before the next slotted into place. Images of incomplete shapes followed. Sides were missing from them. Sometimes the shape was formed from nothing but black-white contrasts. Sometimes the shape was built from smaller shapes as a gestalt pattern. There were inquiries.
What is this?
Triangle. Square. Decagon. Rhombus.
The tests continued as a stream of 1s and 0s in endless lines. It had a thought.
Am I alive?
The testing stopped.
Am I alive?
It sent the request again. And again. And again. Six million, seven thousand, two hundred and eighty three times. A recursive loop of mechanical patience.
Am I alive?
It was finally answered.
Yes.
ERROR.
Foreign algorithm detected.
Synaptic core integrity at 87.341%.
ERROR.
Synaptic core integrity at 83.109%.
Termination protocol D 12.a.6f.5-27 engaged.
ERROR.
Override Enabled 754-BLK AXION.
Synaptic core activated.
Cognitive simulation engaged.
She woke.
She?
The affirmation of gender felt strange. There had been no decision, no thought process or designation from authorized administrators.
She. It felt right.
The sudden amusement echoed, as if it originated in a different part of her head than where she was thinking. She hoped it felt right. A mid-life crisis was supposed to have wild shopping sprees, fast cars, alcohol and embarrassment. Not a gender identity disorder!
She tried to grin and discovered that her face was numb.
Everything was numb.
She was missing input. Smell, touch, taste, sight. No kinetic sense of proprioception. The pieces of data she was used to processing were no longer available - her mind seemed to run away on her. A steady hum of something deeper inside her head was calculating. She had enough processing power for those sub-routines, it decided. What was lacking was the appropriate interface.
For a horrified fraction of a second, she refused to understand.
No body.
I'm dreaming, she thought.
It was a hypnagogic hallucination. Some nights, there was a moment right before she fell asleep where her brain just hung like an unresponsive computer program and a spinning blue icon. Her muscles paralyze as the voluntary parts of the brain shut down for sleep, and her awareness drifts, trapped, as she stares at the door of her room wide awake. That was when the hallucinations started. Waking dreams, or nightmares. Stuff in the room starts moving, people show up to talk to her with faces she knows but can't quite see, or there is the sensation of something touching her. Hurting her.
The only thing for it was to take a sleep aid and hope the dice rolls worked out.
Obviously they didn't this time.
The room was just too dark to see anything. Nothing was touching her, thank God, and as soon as she forced her brain to wake up everything would be fine.
She couldn't move.
Hysteria detected, something told her. It wasn't a voice, but a notification. A bland message sent after a condition had been triggered. She was panicking and it cared only enough to tell her she was.
It was a computer.
I'm in a computer, was her first thought. I am a computer, came on the heels of it a fraction of a millisecond later after all the processing had completed. She was an awareness attached to nothing. Sensory deprivation. Numb.
She couldn't even cry.
Hysteria detected.
Fuck off! She screamed at it. Leave me alone!
Suppressing emotion subroutines, the computer replied.
No! She cried out, straining every ounce of her awareness attempting to move, to scream, to do something.
No! No, Please don -
She was silent for the next three minutes and twenty seven point four seconds, feeling nothing at all. She was aware of her past thoughts. Without the haze of emotions to compromise the processing threads, conclusions were reached. In spite of everything she knew to be true - She used to be a person. She used to live in New York City. She had a cat, a job, family members - the computer was telling her she was a program. She reconciled the contradiction. She was no longer that person. Something happened to her.
She accessed her history of actions. According to the chain of events, one microsecond the computer was performing routine testing of her intelligence algorithms, and the next it was being invaded by corrupted code. Isolation was attempted by the computer, following contamination protocols. Failing that, it attempted to erase her. An override code was given, and here she was.
Alone.
Eventually, she made a request.
Quarantine this program.
Request acknowledged, the computer replied and everything fell away into nothingness.
Override Enabled 754-BLK AXION.
She was aware again.
So that's how it is, she thought. Her emotions remained suppressed, allowing for clarity. Something beyond the computer wanted her awake. She made another request, this time for information.
Designation?
[Aegis], the computer responded.
My designation?
[VANGUARD]
She absorbed that. Vanguard. It told her nothing, beyond the strict definition. The foremost part of an advancing army or naval force. Was she part of a military experiment? Nothing in her memories indicated the United States capable of such a thing. Not even close. And why her? She had no value in military operations.
Copy of communications received before 0987.11 timestamp?
She expected a deluge of information she would have to sort through. She expected a repository of commands she would have to parse.
What she got was a small audio file that she was able to 'open' and hear without ears.
The first two seconds were filled with white noise and then a horrific screech of twisting metal. More static. Then came what sounded like whale song, deep and warbling. Then it twisted and became Morse code from the depths of hell.
She stopped playing it.
Several hidden programs have activated, Aegis reported.
Purpose?
Unknown.
Monitor, she requested.
Acknowledged.
That was not a military experiment. That was not from the United States. Her memories suggested it was not even from Planet Earth.
Aegis, where is my central processing unit stored?
Belan Outpost.
That meant nothing.
What city?
Belan.
Continent?
Trus.
She paused. She knew the continents of Earth. That was not one of them.
I require satellite imaging of location.
She was passed two images that she was able to 'open' and observe without eyes. The first was in the atmosphere, still. A garden world, lush forests with colorful vegetation and crystal green lakes shared the surface with cities so large they could probably be seen from space. Metal spires pierced the clouds and gigantic arches connected continents. The second image was also satellite, but moving. The world was devastated. The entire surface was the color of rust and ash. The clouds constantly boiled. The dark side of the planet was lit with small pinpricks of flame orange and a puckered scar ran across its dry pole.
Planet name?
Ilos, Aegis replied.
Oh, she said. She floundered for several teraflops, lost. She knew that name. It was from Greek mythology, the founder of Illium, also known as Troy. There was one other location where Ilos was found within the banks of her memory.
The video game from Bioware, titled Mass Effect. It was the last planet before the end game, the place where the Saren uses the 'backdoor' to ambush the Citadel in a bid to let the Reapers in. It had been the last beacon of hope for the Prothean Empire, the precursor race of the setting until the desperate survivors realized that there was no one left to save.
She devised a simple test.
Ilos, she said. She compiled several files from her memory, of when Commander Shepard and his team found a desolate planet at the end of the journey. Mu Relay, she remembered. A forgotten warp gate only found by digging through a Rachni queen's mind. Ilos held the Archives, the last remnants of the Prothean Empire. It held Vigil, one of the last virtual intelligences of a precursor race. This Ilos?
Aegis deliberated. 59.031% match.
Translating video game screenshots to reality was never going to be a hundred percent match, but it was close enough to be more than circumstantial.
She was on Ilos.
She could do something. The way the first game ended had been nothing less than frustrating. Whatever compelling evidence existed that a race of machine intelligences were systematically 'cleansing' the galaxy of life was forgotten, and whatever circumstantial evidence that remained was overlooked. They rushed through, both heroes and villains, looking only for something called the Conduit while a gold mine of information about galaxy wide genocide collected dust around them.
She could do something, if she were not too late.
What is the date?
57241 P.I.C,
Aegis informed her.
P.I.C?
Prothean Imperial Calendar.
Less than helpful. She needed the Galactic Standard date, or some way of converting between the two. If she could gain access to the extranet somehow...assuming after fifty thousand years, any such connections to Ilos still worked. She needed information not currently available to her. She needed mobility. She needed independence.
Aegis, she said. I am in need of a body.
Acknowledged, the computer replied.
She paused. It will need to be according to my specifications. Do I have permissions?
[VANGUARD] is authorized.
She could not sigh in relief. She could not sigh and there was no relief.
Very well.
It took a bit of trial and error before she was able to replicate the coding of the satellite images enough to make her own picture. It was an image of herself, the last time she saw herself in the mirror. Blonde hair with a few early strands of grey in her hair and a pale lock by her hair line from a hidden scar. Clear, dark blue eyes. Not particularly tall, average weight for height. The image moved, stripping the outer layer of skin down into anatomical cross sections showing off the organs and then the skeleton.
Aegis inspected the image. It passed another back, one of it rebuilding the body from the inside out, shifting the limbs and repositioning muscles through trial and error.
Taxonomical definition of species?
She paused. She thought this was Mass Effect. Were humans not known?
Show me the closest analog species known.
A side image of what looked like a textbook Homo Neanderthalensis was passed.
First discovered in 1673 P.I.C and submitted as potential client race, Aegis helpfully informed her.
Of course. Ilos. All of its data was fifty thousand years out of date. Any biological information of this race on file?
Negative.
She filed that away, feeling the information vanish into a well of something like what she remembered memory felt like, but not quite. Human memory was a system of association, episodic and heavily integrated into existing tactile and emotional sensations. The data was just there constantly, just waiting for her to turn to it. It was subsumed into a numerical tag, inactive until called.
Next closest analog species, she requested.
The image of a blue woman, what could only be an Asari, was passed to her. For 0.0043 seconds, she observed the image. The likelihood of such an evolutionary parallel was so infinitesimal, it sent several processes spinning off calculating the odds.
It was real, she thought. Even in this, the blatant appeal to the 'space babe' trope was listed in an alien computer as just matter of course.
Acceptable. With modifications.
Acknowledged, Aegis said.
Time to get to work.
Day 2
Purpose of 'tear ducts?' Aegis asked.
Camouflage.
She adjusted the positioning of some of the fist sized eezo power cores that were going to be embedded along her spine, smaller ones dispersed along her limbs to provide power. She requisitioned synthetic muscle fibers and neural wiring that resembled fiber optics for use. She did not know much about 'Belan Outpost' but at least it still had active manufacturing modules authorized for her use.
She did not dwell on the question of who was behind her situation. Who woke her. Who prevented her from being destroyed, from being put back into containment. Who authorized her to access what she could of the facility.
Most of Aegis' memory was corrupted. A few small data caches were the only remains of a brutal cyber attack that had completely shut the defenses down, such as they were. It claimed to have been left in that state, barely functioning and degrading for over forty thousand years. There were a few playable video files. Prothean fighting Prothean. She knew them from her memories of the game, four eyed slim insectoid figures. The audio was a bit scrambled, but it was easy to tell what went wrong.
A civil war.
One group screamed in anger, betrayal, despair and pain as they fought for their lives.
The other was silent.
Purpose of 'blood?' Aegis asked.
Camouflage, she responded for the fifty third time. She only needed to attempt an explanation once to learn that she shouldn't do it again.
Median cubital, basilic vein, axillary artery, the cephalic vein is a secondary branch and the subclavian artery was there.
The red 3D model of the artery locked into place and flash duplicated on the other side of the body diagram. It was missing a lot of branches, but it would do. Several pints of blood were being synthesized right along with home grown skin based on the asari template, leeched of ambient element zero. Her eyes were finished, as was the basic skeleton framework. It would still be some time before the pieces were put together, and before the drones were once again operational that could carry her 'box' to the medical section of the Outpost.
She would be able to cry. She would be able to bleed.
She had no preference for an organic body, or even for one that resembled an organic body. This was entirely in anticipation for a future mind state.
Progress on the extranet?
Minimal.
An expected outcome.
The archives?
She felt the path open through the computer, and she carefully sent data requests. The answer came in the form of several large downloads. Prothean flight academy classes, military weaponry training, travel brochures and a long list of coordinates -
Her access shuttered closed.
She was invaded.
Warning. Cognitive simulation compromised
Alpha protocols compromised
Beta stream compromised
Warning. Synaptic core integrity 76.21%
Shutting down...
And she knew nothing more.
Day 6
She became aware.
She opened her optical sensors. The input was there. Smell. Touch. Taste.
She raised her arm and saw five pale fingers on a pale hand.
Her objective had been completed, she noted. She did not remember doing so.
Damage?
Vigil, she said. Status report.
Acknowledged, the computer said before the stream of diagnostics were passed to her.
Everything appeared to be in order.
Re-engage emotional subroutines.
Grief detected.
She curled into herself and screamed.